aluminum cooking pots

Copper is poisonous. You'd want to line it with tin. Karl

Aluminum isn't good either unless it's coated so the food doesn't touch the aluminum. Better to be made from stainless steel.

Copper is fine for certain uses, a bare copper kettle is the preferred vessel for candy making.

BUT, copper is reactive when exposed to highly acidic foods, and the resulting compounds in the food taste horrible in small quantities and poisonus in larger quantities. So you coat the pot on the inside with tin, and it has to be renewed every few years or few hundred uses.

People used to make a living doing this, tinkers were almostg as common as blacksmiths and buggy whip makers.

Nowadays, they make laminated pots with a stainless interior and a big slab of copper on the bottom for the even heat spread qualities.

This is also why you NEVER use copper tubing on a soda fountain (stainless steel or plastic lines only) and why they require special double backflow valves on the water supply line, so the carbonated water can not get back into the copper building pipes. The copper reacts with the CO2 (carbonic acid) and will make anyone who drinks the tainted water REALLY sick.

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I wonder why I'm not dead, what with all the beer that I've drunk that was brewed in copper vessels.

Uh-oh. I should be dead from the copper water lines.

Pete Stanaitis

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Nothing wrong with aluminum for cooking pots. Commercial kitchens use them all the time. I don't the specific alloy, but any kitchen supply store will have lots of plain aluminum cooking pots and it isn't coated.

Bill Ranck Blacksburg, Va.

You'd have to tell someone HOW you planned to make your aluminum pot, and what size pot you want to make. Are you going to cast it? Are you going to cold draw it? Are you going to hot forge it? Are you going to spin it? Are you going to fabricate it by welding several pieces together? ?

Each method has its own material needs. The expertise and equipment needed for each method are unique, too, which you'd need to already have, or be prepared to obtain.

Copper vessels are a lot easier to make by hand and without expensive tools, since pure copper is very ductile. However, the skill set necessary to do the job doesn't come easily and there is quite a bit of manual (Google "raising copper")effort required to do it. Tinning the vessel after forming it is not a big deal, if you need to do it all for your application.

Pete Stanaitis

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snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrote:

I think several different alloys are used, but here's a link to a maker that uses 3003.

Hope that helps.

Bill Ranck Blacksburg, Va.

Hi Pete, water-soluble copper *ions* (give a blue or blue-green solution in high enough concentration) are indeed poisonous. Copper

*metal* water lines are usually no problem because copper is pretty inert as metals go (tin is even more so). That's one of the reasons copper is so great for plumbing.

But if the fluid in the copper metal is sufficiently acidic, small amounts of copper ions can be formed. At low concentrations there's a nasty metallic taste to the water. Higher concentrations are doubleplusungood.

This points to a universal truth: a metal (or nonmetal) in its

*element* form is radically different in both physical and chemical properties from the same element in a compound or in ionic form. Potassium and sodium (ions) are both necessary to life, but if you swallowed either metal, life would be....interesting. And quite short.

OTOH, a child may swallow a steel ball bearing with little hazard apart from an unusual subsequent bowel movement. But iron poisoning (from supplements, ferrous ions) is one of the leading causes of death among young children.

Best -- Terry ...sorry about that, I can't help trying to teach...

The newer ones are anodized to seal the metal.

Richard W.

thank you all ,it helps a lot ,the reason why i want to make aluminum pot is to heat rapidly and retain even heat. and some chef in japan love those ,so do i ,used be chef long time ago ,i plan to make veriety size of those.

copper one ,i sometimes saw in department store and so expensive ,that why i was curious .

thanks again Yoshi.

OK so I left out a couple cooking devices it's used in without tinning but it looks like he's going to use them for a variety of purposes so not a good idea without tinning. I have one teflon coated AL pan the rest are natural AL. The hard aluminum hard anodizing is part of a nonstick process not for food safety. If you want to get scared by cookware look up what happens when you heat teflon pans too hot. Karl

You don't cook much, apparently.

Try cooking something acidic -- sweet-and-sour sauce, say, or anything with tomatos in it, like spaghetti sauce -- in an aluminum pot. Then see how you enjoy the metallic taste in your food.

I do spaghetti in an aluminum electric frypan all the time, no "metallic taste" noticed. That's not to say some of the surface doesn't leach, but not so it affects the taste.

Stan

I use an aluminum pot to make spaghetti sauce , and have for years . No off taste that I can detect . Of course , as old as that pot is , it's likely got a nice coating of Al Oxide ...

For that matter, I've salted and pickled onions and shallots in an aluminium container. To be fair, the pepper corns and chilies may have disguised any metallic taste :-)

Mark Rand RTFM

Human Exposure To Aluminum And Multiple Sclerosis Link, Keele University

Scientists at Keele University in Staffordshire have discovered the first evidence of a link between human exposure to aluminum and multiple sclerosis.

Their research has demonstrated very high (up to 40 times the control level) urinary excretion of aluminum in MS, particularly so in the relapsing-remitting form of the disease. Urinary excretion of iron was also significantly elevated in MS and particularly so in the secondary progressive form of the disease.

Urinary excretion of silicon, the ?natural' antagonist to the potential toxicity of aluminum, was decreased in MS and particularly so in secondary progressive form of the disease.

The research suggests that individuals with MS have a higher body burden of aluminum and that their urinary excretion of aluminum is linked to changes taking place during the relapsing-remitting stage of the disease.

Dr Christopher Exley, Birchall Centre for Inorganic Chemistry and Materials Science, Lennard-Jones Laboratories, Keele University, Staffordshire, said: ?If, as is currently believed, MS is a disorder resulting from the interplay between the environment and susceptibility genes then our observation of elevated excretion of iron may be indicative of the latter, while elevated excretion of aluminum suggests that exposure to aluminum may be the hitherto unrecognized environmental factor in MS.?

Other researchers involved in the study were: Godwin Mamutse(2), Olga Korchazhkina(3), Eleanor Pye(2), Stanislav Strekopytov(1), Anthony Polwart(4), Clive Hawkins(2).

(2) - Department of Neurology, University Hospital of North Staffordshire, Keele University, Staffordshire, UK.

(3) - Institute for Science and Technology in Medicine, Keele University, Staffordshire, UK.

(4) - School of Life Sciences, Huxley Building, Keele University, Staffordshire, UK.

KEELE UNIVERSITY Keele Staffordshire ST5 5BG UK

Article URL: Richard W.

Aluminum was being blamed for Alzheimers for a while.

The problem is that even if their measurements of excretion levels are correct, the correlation cannot tell cause from effect from common cause. One looks for such correlations first before trying to establish causation, because proving causation is far harder to do.

Joe Gwinn

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Alum is aluminum sulphate:

jsw